With the advent of Digital TV (DTV), the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) and media delivery systems like Internet Protocol TV (IP-TV), and video-on-demand (VOD); viewing content has become very flexible. A user may record a show and watch it later at his convenience. Current DVRs come with large enough storage to store several hours of content.
However, users want to be able to enjoy media content on the move. Portable Media Player (PMP) support for consumer premises equipment (CPE) like DVRs and digital set-top-boxes (STB) allows for mobile viewing of media content. With this feature, users can connect a PMP to a CPE and can choose the content to be transferred to the PMP to be viewed at later instance. Transferring content from a CPE to a PMP may include determining specific viewing or copying rights, authenticating such rights, encrypting/decrypting the content and so on. Such transferring may be referred to as synchronizing or syncing. In use, a user will select content to be transferred to the PMP and the CPE will sync the entire transport stream (TS) associated with that content. The user may then select the content to be displayed on the PMP.
FIG. 1 illustrates an example conventional content distribution system capable of delivering media content from a service provider to an end user.
As illustrated in the figure, content distribution system 100 includes a content distributor 102, a service provider 104, a third party portal 106 and a user premises 108. User premises 108 includes CPE 110 and a PMP 112.
Content distributor 102 is capable of transmitting media content to service provider 104 by way of a signal 114. Third party portal 106 is capable of transmitting media content to service provider 104 by way of a signal 116. Service provider 104 is capable of transmitting media content to CPE 110 of user premises 108 by way of a signal 118. CPE 110 is capable of transmitting media content to PMP 112 by way of a signal 120.
In operation, service provider 104 receives media content by way of signal 114 from content distributor 102 or by way of signal 116 from third party portal 106. Service provider then transmits the media content to CPE 110 by way of signal 118. A user may also decide to transfer media content to PMP 112 by way of signal 120. Some types of media content require a large amount of memory for storage on either CPE 110 or PMP 112, requiring a user to frequently manage the media content stored on PMP 112.
Several problems associated with this method of content transfer from CPE to PMP will now be described.
If The PMP memory (not shown) becomes full the user is then prompted to delete old or specified content. It would be advantageous if the deletion were done automatically. With the advent of huge content repository and management systems the content is becoming more data intensive. It is not only the format of the content (like space hogging HD video) but also content that may have a plurality of associated information, non-limiting examples of which include different language audio, subtitles, camera angle, director's cut/special, commentary and alternative targeted content.
A user may ask to sync a content to PMP when the PMP may not have space to copy the new content. The user must then browse through the PMP interface and specify distinct portions of content for deletion, one by one. This process may be time consuming and aggravating as the PMP user interface is small and it may be difficult for the user to search through the memory of the PMP.
A user may schedule recordings to record content from an CPE to a PMP. If the scheduled recording requires more memory than available on the PMP, then recording may fail.
When a DVR records a program, the DVR may record the entire transport stream (TS) associated with that program. Different components in the TS are identified with different program identification numbers (PIDs). When a user uses the DVR for playback, specific components of the TS can be presented to the user based on user choice, non-limiting examples of which include audio language and camera angle. The disadvantage of recording the entire TS is that the recording uses a large amount of memory. If the recording is transferred to a PMP, a large amount of PMP memory will be used to store the recording even if there are components of the recording that may never be used on the PMP.
What is needed is a system and method for managing media content on a PMP based on user tendencies.